Gabriel Orozco at Marian Goodman
Elwyn Palmerton
It’s not unusual to encounter a show that’s actually two shows–a totally bifurcated affair. Installation artists do it with their sprawling installations, leaving gallery back rooms to smaller (sellable) work. It’s less common to see a show cleaved neatly in two: half about painting, half about sculpture.
The paintings here, the less successful half, are a purely conceptual enterprise. They all feature the same vocabulary of forms and colors: circles bisected in halves, vertically and horizontally in white, blue, red and metallic gold–rendered in the conventional flat deadpan of hard-edge abstraction. The press release touts that Benjamin J. Buchloh praised his paintings as "testing the possibility of a synthesis of Mondrian and Cage now." Besides sounding a little breathless, it neglects to mention how dull they actually are.
At any rate, Orozco’s paintings look like geometric clutter and feel arbitrary. They suggest how abstraction could result from endless variations on a closed system or that Modernist abstraction is an aesthetic hamster wheel. The video makes this joke all too obvious. The images from the paintings, circles bisected in halves and quarters, flash different colors cycling through a set of permutations. It reduces abstraction to the level of an unsophisticated screensaver–a computer programming or animation exercise. Buchloh’s was a clever critique but, still, these paintings don’t even come close to Mondrian’s cool perfection. Critique, alone, is toothless.
After this, it’s positively startling to see just how good the show’s other room is. It’s Orozco at his finest in diverse sculptural mediums, building astonishment from quotidian objects and materials. The centerpiece of the room is a single piece spread out on two large low plinths scattered with sculptural objects in arrangements that evoke taxonomies of anthropological artifacts. Polyurethane foam dribbles, variously, over wire mesh, Styrofoam globes, and leaks, fungal-like, through a plastic muffin pan. A few bottle caps lie on some dirty sponge packing foam. There are drawings on seashells, a toy car, a dry-looking pizza and more. Out of these humble materials and their simple relationships, Orozco creates an expansive expressive sculptural vocabulary.
Orozco’s game is an investigation of rules’ limitations. It’s a slippery paradoxical zone between systems and formal play (which explains why his paintings fall flat; painting’s conventional boundaries thwart his squirrelly logic). A series of sculptures, cardboard board games strewn with clay balls and wood chips address this directly. Each appears to be in total entropy–literally "unruly"–with pieces scattered and parts of the boards mangled or stained. Unlike his earlier work (like the chessboard made entirely of knights) which presented games as pointless monotony, these suggest the proscription of rules and boundaries as an equally zero-sum operation. Mondrian and Cage were both, ultimately, fixated on rules. Orozco wants to experience the impossible, a spontaneous leap out of their constraints.
Still, a synthesis of Cage and Mondrian is evident here. A photo of a pregnant woman in a bathtub depicts a closely cropped shot of the woman’s submerged belly, like the surface of a voluptuous tropical island, emerging from the plane of the water’s surface. The areas surrounding the belly are in soft focus. The belly glistens with moisture and rivulets of water. It’s a beautiful sentimental image that wouldn’t be out of place in a feel-good self-help manual for pregnant women, but we see it (the belly) here as a bisected sphere (almost disembodied), similar to the forms that Orozco offers in his sculptures as ceramic casts of spherical bowls. The belly is, simply, though not coldly or clinically, presented as geometric volume: the body as pure form. We could call this melding, of life with form, a synthesis of Mondrian’s Modernism and Cage’s Zen attitude towards life and art–probably it is. But, regardless of influence–Cage and Mondrian et al–the sense of humanity, playful humor and specificity are all Orozco’s.
